EVERYTHING about “Carlos,” the new film from the French director Olivier Assayas, is large and ambitious, from its length — about five and a half hours — to its subject matter: the rise and fall of the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. But that’s not how things started.

Initially “Carlos” was meant to be a 90-minute examination of the terrorist’s capture in Sudan in 1994. Once Mr. Assayas, whose work includes the pastoral “Summer Hours” as well as the crime dramas “Demonlover” and “Boarding Gate,” came on board and read through the extensive research that had been accumulated, however, he saw other possibilities.

“Ultimately I realized that the disconnected images I had of Carlos had an interesting, even fascinating connection that somehow paralleled the evolution of Western leftism in those years,” Mr. Assayas said in a recent interview. “So I felt it was the fate of one man and, in a certain way, the story of one generation, plus a meditation on time, history, fate and issues more universal than the specific history of Carlos.”

On one level “Carlos” can be experienced as a thriller with a larger-than-usual overlay of geopolitics. The film’s dramatically rendered centerpiece is the exploit that made Carlos the Jackal internationally known, a December 1975 raid on the meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna, in which oil ministers were taken hostage and eventually released for a multimillion-dollar ransom. Initially involved with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he later became a freelancer, responsible for bomb attacks on trains, banks, restaurants and power stations in Europe, some of them fatal.

But Mr. Assayas also seems interested in offering a psychological portrait of the terrorist mind. Discussing the script, which he wrote with Dan Franck, he mentioned Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Agent” and Dostoyevsky’s “Possessed” as works that are “absolutely part of my background and vocabulary” and that helped him define his attitudes toward terrorism.

In one scene, which takes place after an early attack, Carlos stands naked in front of a mirror, admiring and caressing himself, throwing on talcum powder. At other moments he is abusive to prostitutes and even his German wife, Magdalena Kopp, part of a group of women from the Baader-Meinhof revolutionary cell who mix dourness with hysteria.

The film also depicts an almost Keystone Kops element to many of Carlos’s attacks, undermining the image of the terrorist mastermind that he himself cultivated. One group of attackers can’t find the embassy that they’ve targeted, for instance, while a sloppy operation in Paris ends with rocket-propelled grenades being fired hastily at an El Al passenger plane and missing; in another incident Carlos can’t properly open the door to a bank he wants to bomb.

“He’s such an amateur at times,” said Stephen Smith, a former foreign correspondent and Le Monde editor who compiled the film’s research, some of it from the files of intelligence agencies. “Sometimes I found myself wondering, ‘He’s so dilettantish, how can we depict him as a super-terrorist?’ ”

Mr. Assayas, 55, describes his own political sympathies as “libertarian left,” meaning that he is anti-Stalinist, anti-Maoist and very much aware of the way that revolutionary idealism often curdles into something sinister and oppressive. That appears to be the sentiment that informs the OPEC episode, in which Carlos deliberately tried to strike a resemblance to Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara as the “heroic guerrilla.”

“Carlos is himself an actor,” Mr. Assayas said. “He is extremely media conscious, so when he organizes the Vienna operation, he decides to adopt some kind of Che look, which is fairly ridiculous, right? Even though he was the head of this extremely cynical operation, financed by brutal powers of the Middle East, he was very keen to keep this kind of image of champion of the oppressed and third-world revolutionary, even though what he was doing was exactly the opposite.”

Photo

Mr. Ramirez, who plays the title role in the movie, which was shot on three continents with dialogue in eight languages. Olivier Assayas directed the film, which will open on Friday.Credit
Mark Veltman for The New York Times

Because of the historical sweep of “Carlos” and the amount of time that the title character was going to spend on screen, Mr. Assayas said he worried about finding an actor “with the shoulders and the charisma to carry this kind of movie on his back.” But his concerns ended when he saw Édgar Ramírez, who has played assorted assassins or revolutionaries in films including “Vantage Point,”“The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Che.”

“I think it was kind of a miracle to have found Édgar,” Mr. Assayas said. “Not only does he have the presence, the physicality and the charisma of Carlos, he’s also a very smart man who understood exactly what was going on in the story in terms of the politics, from the 1970s onward.”

Like the real Carlos, Mr. Ramírez is a Venezuelan; their families come from the same small Western Andean state. Mr. Ramirez, 33, whose father is a military officer and whose mother has a law degree, studied communications in college before becoming executive director of a civic group that encourages young people to register to vote, so the world of politics was familiar to him.

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“If I were to say that ever since I was a child I’ve dreamed of being an actor, I’d be lying,” Mr. Ramírez said. “When I was younger, I thought about participating more directly in politics. But as an actor your intentions are more poetic, and so I think I can do more than in politics.”

Discussing his character, Mr. Ramírez contrasts what he calls Carlos’s “hedonism” with Che’s “austerity and unselfishness.”

Carlos is “a bit of a monster, a bit of a dreamer, a bit of an idealist, a bit of an assassin, a mixture of everything, full of contradictions, and that’s what made him interesting to me,” Mr. Ramírez said. “Even after having been through the experience of trying to play him, he continues to be a mystery to me.

“Carlos became famous for always being a master of disguise. That, I believe, is the key. Carlos is always revealing the side of him that fits the place and works for him in that moment, whether the spoiled but charming rich kid or the ruthless mercenary.”

Because of its unusual length and structure, “Carlos,” originally filmed as a mini-series for French television, has proven a challenge to market. Beginning Monday night the film will be broadcast in three parts on the Sundance Channel before opening Friday in two theatrical versions: one edited down to two and a half hours, as well as three separate films to be shown at a handful of theaters. (In New York the shorter version will be shown at the Lincoln Plaza Theater and the three-chapter version at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.) In another unusual wrinkle “Carlos” will also be available through video on demand even as it is being shown in theaters.

“I think it is safe to say that neither we nor anyone else have done anything quite like this, using TV as a springboard for a film,” said Jonathan Sehring, the president of IFC Entertainment, which is distributing the movie. “In a world of fragmented television viewing, it takes a lot to break through the clutter. But this film was made for this kind of experiment.”

As for Carlos, 60, and serving a life sentence in a French prison, he continues to be savvy about manipulating the news media. Through his wife and lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, he has complained about the film, citing details both small (he said he smokes cigars rather than cigarettes) and large (the attack on the OPEC meeting in Vienna was supported, he claimed, not by Saddam Hussein but by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader). As the movie was about to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, he sent a public letter to Mr. Ramírez, reproaching him for having appeared in the film, and has also apparently demanded a share of the film’s profits.

“We made a movie based on his life, not a biography or a documentary,” Mr. Ramírez said. “But he is a person with very strong opinions, so it was no surprise to us that he had a reaction.”

Correction: October 17, 2010

An article last Sunday about the film “Carlos,” a psychological portrait of the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, misstated the year in which Carlos and his team raided a Vienna meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It was December 1975, not 1976.

A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2010, on Page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Sweeping Tale Of a Terrorist And His Time. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe